689. A Murderous Affair: The Habsburgs’ Greatest Scandal (Part 1)

Part one of the Habsburgs' greatest scandal starts at the end: servants axing through a locked door at a hunting lodge outside Vienna, in the scene from Frederic Morton's A Nervous Splendor whose silence 'changed the empire.' The hosts give the game away immediately — the killer is Crown Prince Rudolf, the 30-year-old heir to Austria-Hungary, morphine-and-champagne dependent, riddled with gonorrhea, keeping a skull as a paperweight; his victim and accomplice is his infatuated 17-year-old mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera.

The episode is really a double portrait of Rudolf's parents. Emperor Franz Joseph is 'peak Habsburg': pious, protocol-obsessed (crushed to learn tailors had stopped making a certain decorative button), up at five from an iron bedstead, eating the same boiled beef lunch alone, saying 'it was very nice, I enjoyed it' at every public event. Empress Elisabeth — Sisi — is his opposite: raised by a circus-mad Bavarian duke, chosen over her own sister in a whirlwind courtship at 15, then a proto-Diana celebrity who fled court life for Madeira, Corfu, Northamptonshire fox-hunting and Monte Carlo, learned Hungarian and Greek while her ankle-length hair was dressed, starved herself inside 16-inch corsets, and helped broker the 1867 Compromise that split the empire into Austria-Hungary. Rudolf got the worst of both inheritances plus a monstrous childhood tutor who woke him with pistol shots and made him sleep in the zoo.

Around the family portrait the hosts build 1888 Vienna: the Ringstrasse and its wedding-cake neo-Baroque, Klimt, Mahler and the young Freud, a Jewish population past 100,000 driving the city's professional and cultural life, and Georg von Schönerer's pan-German antisemites — who hate Rudolf precisely for his Jewish friends and liberal anonymous journalism. Rudolf himself, frozen out of real work by his father, edits a 24-volume encyclopedia of the empire, writes apocalyptic letters to editor Moritz Szeps, and despises his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II, who disgraces himself on a state visit by mocking Rudolf's ammunition orders to his face. The episode ends with social climber Countess Larisch engineering Mary Vetsera's pursuit of Rudolf: a curtained carriage ride in the Prater, then a back-stairs visit to his Hofburg apartment, where Mary finds a revolver and a skull on his desk — and picks up the skull.